In the operation of nuclear power plants, there are several important problems that significantly increase the cost of operations and maintenance. Some of these significant problems are: inherently low thermal efficiency, erosion-corrosion fuel storage and waste disposal limitations, equipment maintainability and reliability concerns as well as the limited fuel availability and the expensive requirements of storing spent fuel.
Various approaches have been tried to solve these problems separately, but few of the existing methods attack more than one of these concerns at a time.
Currently, in nuclear power plants (both pressurized water reactors or boiling water reactors), steam at the inlet of the turbine is saturated. This results in lower turbine efficiency and intensive erosion-corrosion problems.